Edel Coffey: Choosing work comes with guilt — it feels like compromising motherhood
Charlotte, Carrie and Miranda in ...And Just Like That.
In my experience, career mojo and mojo-mojo are intricately linked. If the career mojo is off, the mojo-mojo is often out of whack too.
This is not a scientifically controlled study, just something I’ve noticed over the past few years of riding the flooding and ebbing tides of a career interrupted by motherhood and relocation.
There are wilderness years in our careers where for some reason or other we will have to stall, whether it’s to mind children or look after sick parents or retrain because we’ve lost our jobs.
There are years where it’s a struggle to keep working even at the smallest level at all and sometimes it will be a thankless, low-paid struggle. But I think that struggle is worth it.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because I have been enjoying the (aka 2.0) storylines of Miranda, Charlotte, and new character Lisa Todd Wexley rediscovering their careers in middle-age.
After having an epiphany when she realises that she has become a personal maid to her eldest daughter and a momager for her younger daughter, Charlotte decides to restart her former career and take a job at an art gallery.
Her family don’t need her in the way they once did and the vacuum of purpose has exposed a frustrated woman overqualified for cutting the crusts off sandwiches (I can relate).
Charlotte rediscovering her career mojo seems to have done wonders for her mojo-mojo too.
She has semi-embraced her menopausal body and her husband, Harry, is worried that Charlotte’s boss fancies her.
She’s out in the world again, a woman with choices.
It feels like something has changed for Miranda too. Instead of being the self-confessed sexually confused alcoholic who trailed Che across the country, she’s now back in her domain of the law, and there’s a calm power about her. Even her clothes have returned to the chic suits of yore.
Meanwhile, Lisa Todd Wexley may be falling asleep on her laptop (again, I can relate) but she’s also getting honoured by MOMA for her documentary work and refusing to sacrifice her career for her husband’s.
The women all seem to have renewed purpose, direction, and agency and seem dynamic and interesting again. It reminded me that, if we’re lucky enough to have work that we enjoy, there are many psychological benefits.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it because I’ve recently taken on a few extra jobs and, like a badly-dressed version of Miranda, Charlotte, and Lisa, I feel like my mojo-mojo is making its own attempt at a comeback.
I know it’s supposed to be a bad thing, but I definitely identify strongly with my work. When I’m not working, I’m not happy.
During maternity leave, I was utterly lost. I missed the world of work. I’ve since learned that this is a very common experience amongst working women who take a break to have children. But I don’t think this applies only to working mothers.
Having a sense of purpose in the work that we do affects everyone. I remember as a child in the 1980s when unemployment was common, depression was a feared co-morbidity of losing your job, something that needed to be defended against with long walks, crosswords, and keeping busy.
It’s important to our sense of self to feel useful. Often work provides that sense of usefulness for us. I think it’s something we all need as human beings.
I see it even in my local library, where I go to write most weeks. The place is always full of people. Many are there to work, others to study, others to work on building projects, to sing with their choir in the community rooms attached, to knit with their knitting group, or to do the crosswords that are freely available from the front desk. There’s a sense of purpose, routine, connectedness there, and I realised our careers often offer us something similar.
Perhaps that’s why I was always determined to return to work after having children. We’re all multifaceted beings. I’ve come to realise that work is a really important facet of who I am and an essential facet of my personal happiness. I’ve certainly felt guilty about wanting to work as much as I have done because often it feels like, in theory, choosing work, is compromising motherhood.
But what I’ve actually discovered in practise is that the right balance of both leads to something greater than the sum of either’s parts.
Being able to work puts me in a great mood, which means I then happily make as many permutations of the same dinner as my children demand or cut sandwiches into unicorn shapes with a cookie cutter or painstakingly pick the seeds out of watermelon slices without complaint.
My work mojo feeds my mam mojo and they all feed into the mojo-mojo. I know that when I’m working, the house mojo might be a little chaotic but the mojo-mojo is en pointe.
